The site of the Fulton Street Transit Center on Broadway. The Girard Building, left, and the former Childs restaurant (in blue) are coming down now. Next to Childs is the Corbin Building, which will be saved. (Photo: David W. Dunlap/The New York Times) Enlarge this image.
A tantalizing taste of New York’s favorite restaurant chain from a century ago, the pristine pancake palace known as Childs, has emerged in the swirl of demolition for the Fulton Street Transit Center.
Economical and sanitary, the many restaurants run by Samuel and William Childs could be counted on to have a white-uniformed chef and a pancake griddle in their front windows. “White-tiled floors and walls, white-marble tabletops, waitresses in starched white and, oddly enough, crystal chandeliers, attracted a newly germ-conscious public,” Michael and Arianne Batterberry wrote in “On the Town in New York” (1973).
Today, stripped to its bare bones, the 96-year-old Childs branch at 194 Broadway (most recently part of the Riese Organization’s chain), is showing off those white-tiled and mosaic walls to passers-by.
The Childs restaurant, painted blue when it was operated by the Riese Organization, abuts the Girard Building. Both are being demolished. (Photo: David W. Dunlap/The New York Times) Enlarge this image.
With the removal of the Riese Organization’s distracting signage, the original facade in neo-Classical style is once again legible: meanders, dentils, bundled reeds and fruit garlands.
See if your neighborhood Starbucks looks this good in 2103.
Next door, the Girard Building, a 12-story building from 1902, is about halfway down. Though only 23 feet wide, it was richly decorated, most notably with two fierce lion’s heads. A two-story “taxpayer” at Fulton Street has already been razed. Demolition of the Broadway buildings is to be finished by the end of September, said a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. None of the architectural ornament is to be salvaged.
Preservationists won an important concession at the site in 2003, when the M.T.A. agreed to keep the 19th-century Corbin Building and incorporate it into the new transit center, which is meant to be a hub for the tangle of subway lines in that part of Lower Manhattan.
But the Girard Building will be mourned. Or at least missed.
“I will always remember the central stair — steep with beautiful worn stone treads and a very fine brass handrail,” said Guy Nordenson, an engineer whose office was in the building. “I walked down many times because it was so much more pleasant than the tiny elevator. The community of people — including the elegant Ahmed at the door — was diverse and many of them in quite useful and socially engaged practices. We scattered and will likely never see each other again but I will remember them all — from tailor to activists — with respect and pleasure.”
Lion’s head from the Girard building; detail of the neo-Classical ornamentation on the Childs facade; and a glimpse of the white-tile and mosaic wall inside. (Photos: David W. Dunlap/The New York Times)
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